Daily Archives: May 23, 2013

National Geographic: Big, Bigger, Biggest, Space Station (S2 E6)
Big Bigger Biggest Documentary. This episode reveals the technological inventions that made the construction of the International Space Station possible.

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National Geographic: Big, Bigger, Biggest, Space Station (S2 E6) - Video

Convinced an emergency spacewalk fixed the problem, engineers have restored complete functionality to the International Space Station power system that sprung a coolant leak May 9, NASA officials said Wednesday.

NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn on a May 11 spacewalk. Credit: NASA Astronauts spotted leaking ammonia flakes streaming from the vicinity of a pump May 9 and radioed mission control to report the sighting. Engineers on the ground confirmed the leak through telemetry data and shut down one of the space station's eight power cooling loops while ordering astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn to prepare for a spacewalk to locate and resolve the issue.

During a May 11 spacewalk, Cassidy and Marshburn replaced the suspected culprit - an ammonia pump located at the end of the space station's port-side truss. The spacewalkers observed no obvious signs of a leak when mission control powered up the fresh pump.

Ground controllers reconfigured the space station's primary system in the wake of the leak, isolating one of the lab's eight electricity channels crippled by a cooling failure and spreading the outpost's power load across the other seven solar arrays as officials planned a repair.

Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager, said Wednesday the spacewalk fixed the serious leak that appeared May 9.

"A couple of weeks ago, we changed out a pump on the port outboard solar array cooling system, and that seemed to be the source of the big leak that we saw," Suffredini told reporters. "So we today finished transitioning all the [power] loads back on to that particular solar array, and everything is in a nominal fashion as we proceed forward."

The restored cooling system, which services the space station's 2B power channel, ensures the outpost's laboratories and residents continue working on scientific research at a feverish pace easily eclipsing NASA's self-imposed objective of 35 hours of hands-on experiment work per week.

The 2B channel draws power from one of two 115-foot-long wings of the space station's P6 truss lying on the far left end of the space station's structural backbone. The leaky coolant loop dissipates heat from the electronics on the power truss.

The bulk of the space station's electricity comes from four sets of solar arrays mounted on both ends of the 450-ton outpost's 357-foot-long truss. The P6 solar panels, launched on a space shuttle mission in 2000, are the oldest of the four U.S.-built power truss segments.

Suffredini it will take up to a year to determine whether the 2B power channel's coolant system is still leaking at all. Engineers first noticed a minor leak in the same coolant loop in 2007, prompting a spacewalk in 2011 to refill the system with ammonia coolant. After the leak rate increased - likely due to the development of another leak elsewhere in the system - another spacewalk in November 2012 attempted to isolate the location of the slow leak with a bypass of a suspect radiator.

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Space station power system restored to full operations

An American astronaut is about to get seriously crafty in space.

When NASA's Karen Nyberg, the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin officially launch on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station on May 28, the American astronaut will bring a few key creative items with her.

"I actually enjoy sewing and quilting and I am bringing some fabric with me and thread and I'm hoping to create something," Nyberg said. "I don't know yet what it will be but that's part of creativity is that it comes with the feeling of the day so I have the supplies in my hands to create if I get the opportunity and the creative notion to do so." [Women in Space: A Gallery of Firsts (Photos)]

Although the six-month-stint will be Nyberg's longest in space, it is not her first time visiting the International Space Station.

"I'm looking forward to the most this time actually living there," Nyberg told SPACE.com. "I visited space station in 2008 on the space shuttle Discovery, and it was a very, very quick trip, only 14 days and honestly, I don't really remember a lot of it because it just flew on by so fast."

Nyberg, 43, is planning on sharing her experiences on board the station with the world using social media, although she has only be using Twitter (where she posts from the account @AstroKarenN) for a little over a month. She is also on Pintrest with the handle: knyberg.

Nyberg follows in a line of female astronauts who have spent time on board the International Space Station.

"The females that have lived on space station before me are incredible people and have given me a lot of advice on living there and also dealing with having a child at home while living there," Nyberg said. "So it's just fantastic to follow in their footsteps."

The Minnesota native admits that she will miss a few things about life back on Earth aside from her family.

"I also will definitely miss coffee in the morning out of a cup," Nyberg said. "It's just not quite the same when you drink your coffee from a bag."

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Astronaut Packs Crafts for Creative Space Station Trip

Its not something students get to see every day: an astronaut, on screen and transmitting from space, demonstrating in real-time weightlessness and conversing with them.

On Thursday morning, students from one sixth-grade science class and one seventh-grade science class at Fall Rivers Talbot Innovation Middle School got to talk with NASA astronaut and flight engineer Chris Cassidy.

Cassidy is currently orbiting Earth aboard the International Space Station. He occasionally did flips and let his microphone float in front of him, and he answered the wide variety of questions students asked him.

Talbot science teacher Ben Squire, instrumental in organizing the event, introduced the class to Cassidy.

Some questions were scientific for example, weight versus mass. Others were about how long the trip was from Earth to outer space.

Normally, the trip from the ground to the space station would take two days. This expedition took only six hours.

The flight from the ground to the edge of the atmosphere lasts for only eight and a half to nine minutes, Cassidy explained. Then the ship is safely in orbit.

The difficulty is boarding the space station, which moves through space at a speed of 17,500 mph about five miles a second.

Cassidy compared it to a quarterback throwing a pass and hitting a fast-moving target perfectly.

NASA scientists use complex calculation and geometry to compute when targets can be hit. It usually takes about two days to get from the ground to the station, but Cassidys recent trip to station in March lasted only six hours under the right conditions. He and Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin launched from Kazakhstan.

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Astronaut aboard space station answers Talbot students' questions

Clear skies and a passing space station combined for an extraordinary view of Alaska's erupting Pavlof volcano on May 18.

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station snapped a photo of ash streaming from the fiery peak in the Aleutian Islands, about 625 miles (1,000 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage.

Before Mount Pavlof started erupting on May 13, the volcano was as snowy white as its twin, Pavlof Sister, seen sitting directly northeast of the active volcano in the astronaut picture. The combination of melting ice and snow, volcanic gases and lava has sent pyroclastic flows racing down Pavlof's slopes, seen in earlier satellite images tracking the eruption. Pyroclastic flows are lethally hot, superfast flows of gas and rock fragments.

Satellites and earthquake monitors help scientists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) track the ongoing eruption at Pavlof and the more than 30 active volcanoes in Alaska, many of which are far from towns, but can threaten planes with their ash. America's biggest state relies on small planes to ferry people and supplies to remote villages, and international cargo travels from Anchorage to Asia. When clouds hide the ash cloud, satellite heat imagery and seismic tremors help researchers confirm volcanoes such as Pavlof are still actively erupting. Local pilots also call in reports of ash and gas plumes to AVO scientists.

Pavlof's ash column has reached as high as 22,000 feet (7,000 meters), forcing regional airlines to occasionally delay or cancel flights to local villages and towns. Ashfall has been reported in nearby communities, including Sand Point, Nelson Lagoon, King Cove and Cold Bay, according to the AVO.

Scientists are also monitoring an ongoing eruption at Cleveland volcano farther to the west in the Aleutian Islands. With no seismic network at the remote site, scientists rely on satellites and infrasound low-frequency sounds created below the range of human hearing for eruption monitoring at Cleveland volcano.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us@OAPlanet, Facebook& Google+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

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Amazing Ash Cloud Spied from Space Station